Displaying an Office or PDF Document in Confluence

To display an Office or PDF document in a page, use one of the following View File macros in the macro browser:

Office Excel

Office PowerPoint

Office Word

PDF

To add one of the View File macros to a page:

In the Confluence editor, choose Insert > Other Macros.

Find and select the required macro.

Speeding up macro entry with autocomplete: Type { and the beginning of the macro name, to see a list of suggested macros. Details are in Using Autocomplete.

To edit an existing macro: Click the macro placeholder and choose Edit. A macro dialog window will open, where you can edit the parameters of the macro.

Parameters for the Office and PDF macros

Parameters are options that you can set to control the content or format of the macro output. Where the parameter name used in Confluence storage format or wikimarkup is different to the label used in the macro browser, it will be listed below in brackets (example).

Macro

Parameter

Default

Description

All View File macros

Page Name

The page which contains the macro

Enter a page name, if you wish to display a document which is attached to another Confluence page.

File Name

none

The file name of the Office or PDF document to be displayed. The document must be attached to a page on your Confluence site.

Office Excel

Show Grid?

true

Select to show grid lines around each cell of the Excel spreadsheet. Clear to hide these grid lines.

Worksheet Name

Last worksheet viewed in the spreadsheet

The name of the worksheet that you want displayed.

Last Row

Last row with content

The number of the last row you want displayed, starting from '0' as the first row.

Last Column

Last column with content

The number of the last column you want displayed, starting from '0' as the first column.

Hint for reducing the size of the spreadsheet: Use the Last Column and Last Row parameters to reduce the size of the spreadsheet displayed on the wiki page. This is especially useful to prevent the display from showing empty cells. This will also help to prevent 'out of memory' errors.

Office

PowerPoint

Height

Specify the height of the display, in pixels (default) or as a percentage of the window's height.

Slide Number

none

Specify the number of the slide that you want displayed on the Confluence page, where the first slide is numbered zero. Instead of a slide show, the page will display just the single slide, represented as a JPEG image. If not specified, all slides display as a slideshow.

Width

Specify the width of the display, in pixels (default) or as a percentage of the window's width.

184 Comments

Anonymous

The quality of my embedded PDF displayed on confluence is seriously lower than that of the original PDF, to the point where you can't read the text in the images, and have trouble with some parts of the doc itself.

Is this as designed? And is there a parameter I can use to disable this quality drop?

yes the viewfile macro generates a PDF view with a poor quality. It is that bad, that I cant use it and it also does not handle large files correctly.

But WiKi stands for fast access and a WiKi is made for HTML an WiKiML, so no wonder why it does handle PDF not the same way as a specific program for PDF. There are programs available to transfer PDF to HTML or other formats, so that you can generate a WiKi page and to attach the original PDF to that page. Those programs extract text as formatted and pictures. With that you get WiKi advantages combined with standard usage of PDF.

I use to embed smaller PDF like following for example

to display PDF. This works fine for files up to 10MB over internet access. For larger files it is not that cool, as the whole file has to be loaded. It might be useful to split larger files into smaller parts maybe like chapters of a book.

This works on Mac OS X and Windows with Safari and Firefox with high quality. You wount get a window inside the page on Mac OS X with buttons but you can use the standard browser or operating system contextual features to change size, download etc. On Widows you get all Adobe functions too. I have to look into it again, to find out how to get all functions as buttons displayed on Mac OS X too.

You have to make sure that the internet plugins for PDF, Flash etc. are installed to have all the functions available.

We released a new plugin called SharpView that addresses the embedded PDF resolution issue and also allows for additional features of zoom, search, print, etc.. ﻿Here's some info, as well as an embedded example.

We also released Google Docs connector for Confluence, which provides some similar options to the Office Connector (i.e., embedded PPT, PDF, spreadsheets, docs, lists, etc..) - as well as the embedded SharpView features.

I need to find out what effect your plugin has as it needs additional software to be installed on confluence servers. We do run Mac and Windows Servers now which have natively all whats needed to view PDF in high quality within confluence. So we quite do not really understand, why extra software is needed to be installed which seem to effect server side port settings to do so. ﻿(we just took a short view!)

The current problem is that available Plugins do have minor but inconvenient inappropriate macro-editor workflows for users or dont activate SVG features which are available on a standard native basis.

Originally I just wanted to find out if SharpView provides a better solution on PDF Workflows and if so it would’t matter to pay for it, because a faster and smoother running workflow would save time and money on the other hand.

Please post more information about compatibility, security and why extra software needs to be installed etc on your home page.

But I wholeheartedly agree with you: Many add-ins with very limited functionality are offered at hugely inflated licensing prices on the back of the functionality flaws in Confluence. I would wish Atlassian paid closer attention to this abuse and ironed out those Confluence kinks itself.

... and I would wish even more that Atlassian fixes the flaws themselves (given all the money we pay for support) instead of pointing to plugin contributors (and later blame 3rd party plugins for malfunctions).

Confluence has hundreds (probably add a 0) of known bugs which they aren't going to fix, many of them are open for 5...10 years, adding up with each release instead of decreasing.

Very much agree. Atlassian blames third parties who are providing solutions to fix their issues. If you have lots of plugins, it makes it nearly impossible to upgrade when they require you to upgrade to get a 'fix', or due to security holes.

They focus on making things look nicer or features that haven't even been asked for or have minimal votes. I don't understand why they haven't figured out:

1) Fix the issues and provide the support across all browsers – users will feel like they have new features because now they can use them!

2) IE and Windows platform aren't the only solution in the universe. Mac is becoming much more prominent and the support is required. If you aren't going to provide cross-browser support on all your features, be up front and indicate you are an IE only platform so that you aren't bringing on Mac customers and they then become frustrated and your support costs increase.

3) Fixing the issues reduces support cost. Reduce support cost and you can invest those dollars into new development.

I would much rather have a stable, usable product and a wiki that is usuable by both technical and business users. Please don't continue to work on the UI to move things around, work on fonts, enhancing the social media options, and trying to make it look "better". Fix the issues so that the features work, address security holes, address performance issues, and address issues that are result in users losing their data - those seem important!

Hi Ellen Feaheny (AppFusions) - looking to replace the viewpdf with your SharpView version - where is the viewpdf module hidden in Confluence? I want to disable it - do you know which addon it's under?

Great idea! We could add some options in the SharpView plugin to more proactively/optionally deal with any existing viewpdf macro instances. I have logged this to AppFusions' engineering and we will try to get a new release out in August sometime.

Anonymous

I have a powerpoint presentation that contain mostly tables or pictures of tables. When I attach the file and the use the viewfile macro - all of the colors and some of the gridlines in the table disappear. Any suggestions?

Unfortunately, I can't seem to reproduce this problem in my local instance. Feel free to raise a support ticket at https://support.atlassian.com for further investigation. You might want to attach an example powerpoint slides to the ticket.

I have a similar problem. I am never sure if a PowerPoint will be displayed correctly by the viewfile macro, therefore we decided to convert all the PPT to Adobe PDF. It is very time consuming to go through each PPT (sometimes 10's or >100 slides) and compare with the original, to check if they are displayed right or wrong.

But now, we are experiencing another, even worse, problem (look some posts below) displaying the files. They are not showing up at all.

Unfortunately this feature is not implemented yet. Feel free to raise a feature request at http://jira.atlassian.com. and describe more in details how you want this feature to work. Vote for it and add yourself as watcher. For further details on Implementation of New Feature and Improvement please browse to the attached link.

Confluence uses Apache POI to extract the contents of the Microsoft Office documents. In the advent of support for Office 2007 (Office Open XML Support) files in the current beta version of the library, this might be possible in the near future. Please watch the bug reports to keep yourself updated. Hope that helps!

While the view file macro seems to work well, the performance is too slow to be a practical feature. It might take 30 seconds to load an excel file into a webpage. Everything else seems to run nice and fast.

Is it normal for it to take ages to load spreadsheets? I hate to imagine how slow it would be if multiple people tried to use it at the same time.

Sometimes I also get an error which I think is related to memory as I ran the command to use 512RAM and that fixed the problem for one spreadsheet. Is it supposed to use lots of memory?

If it is normal to be slow and performance hungry is there another way to be able to open, edit and save spreadsheets from confluence? The only other way I can find is with webdav (which has it's own problems and I don't want to make it available to everyone). How come when I open spreadsheets from the attachments page it can't just open it the same way it does from the view file macro? that is how come I can't save them? Is there a way to make this work? a plugin maybe? Or is this by design so you can keep track of versioning etc?

Some conversions will take longer, especially for documents containing complex data, charts, images, figures, etc. Perhaps, the request WORDDV-126 - Conversion queue to optimize performance would be a relief for this issue. However, if you encounter an outstanding out of memory problem due to simple conversion, please do let us know.

Opening the attachments from the attachments page will only ask your browser to download a copy of the attachment and place it in your machine's temp folder - your OS will then open that in an appropriate application.

Is there a way to specify a sheet number instead of a sheet name when using viewfile with Excel files? I'm using scaffolding and reporting to allow end users to select the excel file they want to display, and to select which sheet to display. But I have no way to know the sheet names, so I want to use sheet numbers.

I am afraid that this is not currently possible in Confluence. Feel free to raise a feature request at http://jira.atlassian.com. and describe in detail how you require this feature to work. Please add yourself as a watcher, vote for this feature and add your own comments to this feature request. For further details on how we include new features and improvements, you might want to read this page

Sorry if this comes in a little late - I stumbled across your comment just now. As far as I know, the macro does not support files created in Microsoft Word 2008 (Mac) yet. This might be related to WORDDV-101, too.

I'm running 2.8.2 and all staff had flash player 9 installed and the viewfile for powerpoint files was working fine. Everyone in the company has been upgraded to flash player 10 and now the viewfile for powerpoint files is giving a blank screen.

Yes, you cant do that. Because the macro will only convert the content of your excel file to HTML directly without further processing in Confluence. Because the macro that you use in Confluence is actually a macro which needs Confluence's processing. While viewfile macro is macro outside Confluence core code. So, you need a complete URL address of the page so that you can click it.

Hi Zed, thanks for the reply but concerning the Attachment Checkout Plugin, I read in the Known Issues that this macro is not compatible with the Viewfile macro so i thought it makes no sense to use it but I will give it a try and see where we get.

Unfortunately, I was not able to reproduce this locally on a Confluence 3.0 and 2.10.3 instance. You might want to check that the numbering in the Word document is correct (try closing and reopening it in Word).

Sorry if this is a little too late. However, if the problem remains unresolved, feel free to raise a support ticket for further investigation. In the meantime, I would suggest you to temporarily disable the customisation and see if the problem persists.

I'd suggest you to test the plugin with a PDF which is not created by Adobe Pro v9. Perhaps, you can try exporting this page to PDF and use it in your instance. If that works, there must be something wrong with the PDF you have created. Otherwise, please check that your browser can actually display Flash files.

I am not able to reproduce your first problem. Excel graphs are displaying properly in Confluence. I would suggest you to raise a support ticket to https://support.atlassian.com, so that your issue can be further investigated. Also provide the following:

Wiki markup used for the problem

Word processor that you used and the version

A sample of an Excel file that can reproduce the issue

A copy of your Confluence log files located at <confluence-home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log

The system information page. You can obtain the page by accessing the http://<path-to-confluence>/500page.jsp

As for your second issue, I could not even hide the columns in my instance. I would suggest you to raise a new feature request at http://jira.atlassian.com as for this issue.

Anonymous

Jsashi,

Thank you for your reply. I just confirmed that I can in fact hide columns but not rows. I will enter a Jira ticket on this.

As for the graph display, I did some more experimenting. As long as the charts are on the same tab as the data used to generate them, they display. If the charts on a different tab and I reference the tab with the charts on them, they are not displayed.

I absolutely agree with that. This is a feature I am missing as well. Editing documents using the viewfile's webdav launcher is so much easier compared to the conventional way, which is like: open an attachment, save a copy to disk, edit the doc, and finally upload it again as attachment.

Is there any other way to open documents via webdav from within Confluence?

I believe that this feature is being addressed in our current beta release of 3.1. You can try it on this instance; visit the Attachments of this page and you should see there is a direct link to edit Office documents. You can use the {attachments} macro in case you would like to display the list in a Confluence page.

For 1, the reason why it seems to have stripped the extra spaces is due to HTML treating multiple spaces as one. You can edit the same document and you will realise the formatting will still be retained in the Word Processor. As a workaround, you might want to use a hidden table (table without borders) to format your data.

As for the text highlighting, I guess this is a limitation of the Office Connector plugin. Feel free to raise a feature request at http://jira.atlassian.com. and describe in detail how you require this feature to work. Please add yourself as a watcher, vote for this feature and add your own comments to this feature request. For further details on how we include new features and improvements, you might want to read this page

Above comments are aged but almost have actuality because this is something my clients often claim to not work properly.

From my knowledge of using word docs in confluence: a correctly formatted word doc using the standard formatting features of Office Word, or Neo Office with same fonts installed on clients and servers tends to display a appropriate formatted and useable doc in conflunece.

People often edit in word manually instead of using standard formatting features form word processors – most common – use "spacebar" and "return" to position spaces between words and text of blocks. Result on confluence page will be messed up since as you described all those created "spaces" between e.g. textblocks in Office Word are commands that will be handled as one command and so on.

Use standard word formatting features in word processors to achive very good (but not perfect) results in confluence using viewfile.

Take care that fonts used in word docs and not available in confluence will be exchanged to those available by confluence default settings. So Fonts need to be installed on the confluence server to match font’s used in docs.

As custom or default CSS do influence how content will be displayed a space admin maybe need to arrange it all on a custom way that appearance matches closely.

If you received bad formatted doc. and have no time to format it in a correct manner – do a PDF printout and display this and just place the word doc as an attachement.

Hi Kulls,
The {viewxls:} will render whatever content in your excel file. In other words, if you wish to have links that link back to JIRA issues, you must provide the link in your excel file, for example:

You can export your JIRA search result to Microsoft Excel, the issue key in search result will contain a link to corresponding JIRA issue (if you are using Confluence 3.1, make sure the excel file is in 2007 format by re-opening and re-saving the excel file into .xlsx format)

Upload the excel file to desire page, render it with {viewxls:name=file_name.xlsx} macro

Anonymous

WEBDAV enabled, Office connector enabled. Flash v10 installed and checked. Files attached to the page. When I add in viewxls (44 lines and 14 columns) I get one blank row. The edit document button brings up the correct xls for editing, but nothing dispays on the page. Same result with powerpoint, get a blank square with nothing displaying.

Would it be possible to document a small note in the Viewfile macro section for displaying word documents. This note will be to indicate to the user that the fonts from the word document recognized by confluence are displayed as is, however if the word document contains a font that confluence does not recognize, then it will display it using the default font of the confluence page if there is such a notion.

I am using the view file macro to display my word attachment on my confluence page. The problem I have is that when the word document is displayed on the confluence page, it is not showing the same font as the document. The font used in the word document is Arial, and the confluence is displaying the material as Times New Roman. Is there a way to change this?

I am referring to your previous query above. I believe you are encountering the same issue as documented in our KB. If this is true, you may want to try the resolution as suggested in the KB.

We are trying to use this plugin to view pdf files in our installation on Confluence 3.0.

The plugin works, but its unbearably slow when using Internet Explorer 7. At times the browser will freeze for 10+ seconds until the pdf loads. Using IE6 the plugin is very snappy and returns the pdf quickly. While not as fast as IE6, using Firefox works as well but is a tad slow. I am currently running Flash Version 10,0,32,18.

Are there any known issues with this combination of Flash, IE7 & Confluence 3.0? Any suggestions on how to debug this would be appreciated.

For displaying pdf's, I created a simpe macro in Confluence, that uses html, to embed the pdf in the page. Because it uses the adobe plugin for MSIE , it brings up the Adobe wrapper or frame, has all the adobe functionality, and it looks a better. Often times (viewfile) would not work 100% with pdfs sourced from different applications.

other advantage of the macro, is that I can embed pdf that are in sharepoint or shared drives, not just inserted in the same wiki page. The macro also shows a link below the pdf frame, pointing to the source file, so the user can open the file in a new window.

the html code i am using, you can download from the internet, tons of sites.

I see that there have been previous posts about the poor quality of the file when using viewfile on a PDF file. That post sorted out one of my concerns regarding the use of this macro on that particular file type. However, since we updated to Confluence 3.1.1, I notice that there is an issue with the formatting of the text in the display of a PDF when using the viewfile macro. The most common error is that all text is converted to italic and the document is repaginated. The files were displayed correctly in the previous version of Confluence, 2.10.3. Any thoughts on this? Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

We also have examples of PDF files that are not displayed at all when using viewfile, as well as files where all text is illegible because all characters are shown as squares. Font problem one might think, but the original PDF file looks OK. Any thoughts on this?

For this to work, your browser needs to have the Adobe plug-ins installed, I guess.

You need to be a Confluence Admin. I assume you know where "User Macros" is.

Give the macro a short easy to remember but unique name. Toggle on "Macro has a body".

Select "Macro generates wiki markup"

In Template, put

(the macro will also create a link below the viwer, to open the document in a new window)

When you use this macro, you only need to add the URL where the PDF is stored. This works very well with Confluence attachments and SharePoint files. The URL can't have spaces . Replace spaces with "%20"

We have a version of the macro that creates a "portrait" viewer, and a landscape viewer. You just need toadjust the dimensions in the macro to the size you need.

I am trying to use this macro to display a fairly large spreadsheet on the Confluence page. The result is a huge webpage in which the user can see only the smallest upper left corner of the entire spreadsheet. "height=" and "width=" don't work, and neither does saving the spreadsheet at, say 25%. Is there a way to define a zoom or control the size of the spreadsheet when it's displayed?

I am afraid that there is no such an option. Perhaps, you can try separating the sheet into multiple sheets, and use the sheet parameter to display them selectively? Anyway, if you are keen on this, feel free to raise a feature request in our issue tracker.

I'm unable to show two sheets from the same excel document on a single wiki page.

I'm using two instances for the ViewXLS Macro on the same Wiki Page. Each instance points to the same document, but a different sheet. Unfortunately both instances of the macro shows the sheet parameter defined in the first instance of the macro. Is this a known behavior? Are there plans to make this possible?

Please add yourself as a watcher, vote for this improvement and add your own comments to this request. For further details on how we include new features and improvements, you might want to read this page.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to reproduce this problem in my local instance. Feel free to raise a support ticket at https://support.atlassian.com for further investigation. You might want to attach an example of Excel files to the ticket.

However, I have a mere suggestion. I believe you will need to set the date format to be in AU format in the Excel itself. Failing that, you might want to change the Time and Date Format in the General Configuration. Please refer to this page for more details.

I've added a lot of documents with this macro and it has worked fine so far. I'm wondering if there is a way for Confluence to save old versions of embedded documents once they've been edited. I know that confluence saves versions of changes made to text but will it save versions of word docs edited? If you have any solutions please let me know!!

If you use edit mode to directly edit a document in word, than the attached word doc will be downloaded, send to word, you do your edit and it will be resend to confluence as attachment. If you look at your attachments you should see al previous versions.

That's not quite what I meant... The documents in my pages have been added as attachments and then embedded into the wiki pages using the view file macro. So each wiki page has the view file macro in the wiki markup, not the actual text of the document. Is there anyway to save changes made to the document?

I guess you mean with "save changes to the document" the attached word document. You cant save changes to the word document, but you can attache the changed document again. You have two options to edit a page. One is just "edit", which will edit the content inside a page. And one is called "edit document" Which will download an attached word document, to be edited localy and automatically resend as a new attachment into confluence. See: Editing an Office Document from Confluence. If you dont see "Edit Document" Office Connector might be disabled.

If this is not that what you are talking about, someone else might understand and help you.

Anonymous

This could be solved if your computer is updated to the latest browser software available with all its updated plugins you might have installed. It has something to do that graphics do not get handled right if FlashPlayer is installed and if you run Firefox on Mac. With Firefox on Windows Vista you get at least some minor graphical errors. I did reported this to Firefox.

I am not a Wiki Mark Up user yet. I am a Mac user having trouble using Macros to embed documents. I have downloaded the Office Connector as well as NeoOffice and WebDAV Launcher and am not able to effectively upload documents and edit them on the wiki. I have double checked the versions, am I missing something? Help!

I can just tell that with confluence 3.4 and Firefox 3.6.11 and Neo Office 3.1.2 Patch 1 it works on actual intel macs until that point, that you want to save a doc back to confluence which does not seem to work or not known how to do it. I did test it today by accident and you can take a look at following issue: Neo Office edit and safe back to confluence.

Current workarounds are to save locally and upload it again as an attachement or to use Parallels, XP, Vista or Windows 7 with Firefox installed on a mac.

When using the viewxls macro to embed an Excel spreadsheet in a Confluence page, any indents / indentations at the beginning of a cell (created using the "Increase Indent" / "Decrease Indent" buttons in the Excel toolbar) are not displayed.

As a consequence, a column of values in an Excel sheet that represent a hierarchy (with the structure of the hierarchy being defined by the indent level of each value) end up looking like just a flat list when viewed in a Confluence page.

Is there any fix or workaround for this behavior? I considered using leading space characters rather than the indent feature of Excel in my worksheet, but that would make the worksheet itself a lot harder to maintain. (For example, I would be unable to select many cells and indent/unindent them all at the same time -- e.g. when adding a new level to the hierarchy.) Thanks in advance for any advice!

Klaus, thanks for the suggestion! However, the reason I was interested in the viewxls macro in particular is the ease of editing that it affords: one click (on the "Edit Document" button) to open the spreadsheet for editing in Excel, and the Excel file automatically gets updated on the Confluence page when saved by the user.

My requirement is also specifically for a spreadsheet (rather than a mind map or other format); this particular spreadsheet just happens to have one column where the data needs to be visually represented hierarchically (via indenting cells that are at lower levels of the hierarchy).

Confluence MS-Office integration is some kind of basic implementation and not the best for presentation of documents generated with MS-Office. I thought that you wanted to use an organizational diagram but if you want to do something else you might want to create a thread at the confluence forum to get an answer for your specific question.

Anonymous

you could do this if you have adobe or any other pdf plug-in installed in your browser that provides this functionality and use a user-pdf-macro which is mentioned a few times on this page or you invest a few bucks and use SharpView to get this ability.

If you just right click on a pdf link an use "view pdf in another window" it should activate your pdf browser plug-in in use anyway so that "jump to page No." function should be activated.

Most plugins needs to download whole pdf to be viewed to that computer that starts a view. Large pdf files should be avoided because they will always get downloaded – time consumption job – each time you call up a page and click on view. Maybe SharpView dont have this issue because they seem to render the pdf on the server.

Whatever you manage to be viewable could be downloaded too – check your security requirements too.

Anonymous

Is there any option on Excel macro to display more than 1 sheet? In my worksheet test.xls, I have 3 sheets(sheet1, sheet2, sheet3) and I would to display all 3 sheet so user can click on sheet and see data from whatever sheet he/she selected.

Anonymous

We currently have Confluence 3.3. We have a number of visio documents that have been converted to PDF that we're attempting to display using the viewpdf macro. All we get in the PDF viewer is a white screen area with a grey box where one of the items in the workflow displayed on the PDF is located. When we try printing an email to PDF and using the macro, it displays fine, however displaying a PDF with images doesn't seem to work.

We have the latest version of Adobe reader and Flash Player, and have tried this on IE9 and Chrome with the same results. In addition, we have tried a couple different file naming conventions (spaces, no spaces, all lowercase) with no effect. Any idea on why we can't get this to display correctly?

I want to be able to display a dynamic file that is updated daily with a script. Any idea how to do this in the new version? I tried to use the view file macro viewxls but this seems to require the file to be attached. The file I want to display is an excel file that list server software versions on a group of servers and is updated daily.

Anonymous

As you know, the viewfile macro does not always render PowerPoint and PDF documents correctly. Some elements from the original .ppt, .pptx or .pdf documents simply get lost during their conversion to flash format. This problem has been reported for roughly two years now, and there are several open issues on your Confluence support pages that pertain to the problem.

What absolutely stomps me is that, in all that time, you have virtually not reacted to all the questions and complaints about that malfunction. The issues raised through JIRA have mostly been categorized as "minor" and not even been assigned. The many, many questions and requests for quality information have been ignored. Your last official comment in this thread runs back to the end of 2010, now more than one year ago.

Do you care about your customers? We are paying license fees for 2000 users who would like to know why this central feature does not work correctly. For them, it is not a "minor" issue when parts of their pdf- and ppt-files render with important elements missing. We would like to know what you are planning to do about this and when.

The ability to correctly render Office and PDF documents in Confluence is a MAJOR feature, differential and selling point. It may not be important as to your product philosophy, but it is what promotes quick adoption among the end users. Your advertised kick-ass Office integration was one of top two reasons why we decided for your product. The other one was customer support, by the way. Are you planning to deliver on either one of them?

If the viewfile macro has been fixed and I just don't get it, let me know.

From experience the problem is usually related how the particular PDF was created, but we're happy to look into it for you and see what we can find. I took a quick look but couldn't find any open support requests from yourself, please raise a support ticket via http://support.atlassian.com and include some of the problematic files along with your Confluence logs so we can investigate. We may not be able to fix the problem, but we can at least give you some more info on it.

Also keep in mind there's been a lot of improvements to the Viewfile macro in later versions, so I'd recommend testing on the latest version of Confluence in a staging environment if possible.

If you have any problems please feel free to email me directly - mseager at atlassian dot com.

Anonymous

Hi Michael,

thanks for getting back to me. Since I posted the original comment above, I would like anyone who comes across this page to know that Atlassian has been providing great support since I opened an official support request. The particular problem with the display of certain .ppt and .pdf files has not yet been resolved, but the support team is investigating it and they are constantly keeping me up to date with their findings and next steps. We are very pleased with how our request is being handled.

When reading older postings and open JIRA requests regarding certain Confluence issues on the Internet, one may get the impression that the Atlassian support team is not responsive. This is obviously not the case, and I recommend anyone with a problem to raise a support ticket.

I have read through all of the comments about increasing the view size; however, with the new viewfile macros, the width and height are not parameters to input. Consequently, without being able to control these dimensions, my pdfs are unreadable and the user must have open the doc to read.

Is there a way to use these parameters or will these options be added back in?

I tried the wikimarkup macro and inserting the old viewfile macro, {viewfile=filename.pdf|width=900,height=1100} - that just rendered an unknown macro error.

I tried {viewpdf:name=filename.pdf|width=900,height=1100} and {viewfile:name=filename.pdf|width=900,height=1100} as well as in each, change the height and width == in both cases, the pdf rendered, but never changed size from the original pdf viewer size. I am not able to make it any bigger, regardless of the dimensions.

I tried the option of !filename.pdf|width=900,height=1100! - that rendered an error message that a plugin needed to be installed (firefox); however, no plugin could be located and thus, could not render.

Anonymous

Hello,

Is it possible to write a brief description about an attachment? For example, I want to have 5 attachments on one page. I would like to have a brief description either above or below each description. Thanks for your help.

Anonymous

I am using viewxls to display a chart from an Excel spreadsheet. The chart itself displays OK, but it doesn't display the legend thus making the chart pretty much useless. Does anybody else see this/have a fix?

I use the view file macro (version 4.3.1) for complex tables made in Word 2010. Within the table there are changes from one column to two or more and back. Some of these tables are shown with all text underlined, but when you open such a table in Word it's not underlined. Has anyone an idea why this happens and what to do about it?

When trying to use the 'viewfile' macro to embed a Powerpoint documentation that is attached to a page, I am receiving the following error. 'Error rendering macro 'viewfile' : The viewfile macro is unable to locate the attachment "attachmentname" on this page'.

We also need the ability to display PDF content on pages without loss of resolution. Please address this. We currently use Confluence in-Cloud which precludes us from licensing and installing external plugins.

Viewing a PDF in OnDemand I cannot see any of the added comments on the file. I don't know if it's different for installed versions of Confluence , but it would be nice to be able to see the comments on the PDF when previewing it.

For us, using the OnDemand version that we recently switched to from the licensed version, pdf files are not rendered at all...just lots of white space. Honestly, you really need to start giving a rip about your product.